1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of furniture and more particularly to a basic furniture structure and a process for producing the basic furniture structure.
2. Prior Art
The prior art related to furniture includes the so-called sheet-building process, by which V-shaped grooves, of which the V-angle is usually 90 degrees, are milled into a panel in the form of a starting workpiece. The grooves are milled along the corner edges which are to be formed on the subsequent inner side of the basic structure. These grooves are made to extend into the vicinity of the outside of the resulting basic structure sides. A film hinge is formed in the vertex region of each individual V-groove which comprises either the coating substance of the relevant panel material or a sheet or film strip adhesively bonded on the outside of the starting panel. This film hinge forms a pivot axis in order for it to be possible for the respectively adjacent basic structure sides to be pivoted or folded toward one another over an angle which corresponds to the V-angle of the cut grooves whereupon the miter surfaces formed by the V-groove, that is the beveled narrow surface sides of the basic structure sides, butt against one another and can be connected to one another by the addition of an adhesive or glue. If the film hinge is formed by adhesively bonded sheet or film strips, the film strips are removed once the basic structure sides have been folded together.
The starting panels are usually coated on the outside with thermoset materials, and the resulting cover layer is not particularly suitable for the sheet-folding process because, due to partially different bending properties, it results in a nonlinear, usually slightly undulating edge formation. There are also often undesirably sharp corner edges between the adjacent panel parts, which cannot be avoided even when adhesively bonded sheets or films are used as film hinges. In the case of coating materials which tend to rupture, such as veneers, the adhesive bonding of sheet or film strips as film hinge is essential and extremely sharp edges are only produced once the folding has been carried out and the sheet or film strips have been removed.